Saturday, August 27, 2016

Stranger Things

Netflix has a new series, Stranger Things, and I highly recommend watching it. It has some of the most believable and talented child actors I have seen for a long time and I get a very strong Stand by Me vibe from it. It's a coming of age story on so many levels and I always enjoy that. It also has horror movie, thriller and conspiracy movie elements thrown in and strange as it sounds, that works really well. Each group of main characters works on a different level - the kids for example are in a fantasy story, but the sheriff is up to his neck in a conspiracy thriller and, with two episodes left for me to watch, the threads are only just coming together.

Winona Ryder is excellent here. I haven't seen her in any movie for ages and the role that I remember her most in is Mina in Bram Stoker's Dracula. This one is ... very different and I almost didn't recognise her.

The first episode starts with the boys playing D&D and that scene is hilarious. I never played much D&D and I started pen and paper RPGs only in my twenties, but the scene still was so very familiar from pretty much every game I have ever played.